Conference 2018

Guiding Theme

The conference’s guiding theme in 2018 is “International Migration Governance: Chances and Limits”.

Unlike with flows of goods and finance, where states have established global institutions to coordinate their policies, no parallel development has taken place with regard to the international mobility of persons. Apart from an increasingly contested regime for the protection of refugees created after World War Two, very little cooperative action has emerged to address large movements of refugees and migrants. In times of rising nationalist tendencies in domestic constituencies, the limits of unilateral and uncoordinated national policies become more and more salient. Why is it so difficult to achieve international governance over this key area of states' interdependence, and under which conditions may we see meaningful international cooperation develop? These are the questions that will be addressed in the keynote speech and subsequent round table.

Call for Abstracts

The call for abstracts opens on the 1st of September 2017 and closes on the 6th of October 2017. A first draft of the program will be released by the end of November 2017.

Keynote

James Hollifield is Ora Nixon Arnold Fellow in International Political Economy, Professor in the Department of Political Science, and Director of the Tower Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, as well as a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC.

Hollifield has served as an Advisor to various governments in North and South America, Europe, East Asia and the Middle East and Africa, as well as the United Nations, the World Bank, the IDB, the OECD, the ILO, the IOM, the EU, and other international organizations. He currently chairs working groups at the World Bank and the IDB and serves on the International Advisory Board of the National Center for Competence in Research (NCCR for Migration and Mobility) of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He has been the recipient of grants from private corporations and foundations as well as government agencies, including the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Social Science Research Council, the Sloan Foundation, the Owens Foundation, the Raytheon Company, and the National Science Foundation.